Greenstick Boy

Hearts and bones broken

In her one-woman show about falling in love with a heroin addict, Maggie Cronin of Doctors fame entertains her audience with winning, bittersweet humour. Entitled Greenstick Boy after a 'greenstick fracture', a slight and sometimes hidden injury to a young person's bones, Cronin revisits her doomed relationship by picking up, then tidying away, old records and books.

Cronin keeps the audience at a distance by calling her character M and the man in her life D, but is candid about her experience of growing up curious and poor in a small English town in the 1970s. After meeting D at a punk concert, she spends her adolescence trying to impress him. Hovering over Ramones and Sex Pistols records, she ruefully recounts her silly behaviour and her ignorance of his drug problem, which escalates out of control.

Cronin plants herself firmly into the past, recounting how she moves on from D to East Midlands College drama school, how she survives post-graduation poverty and how she eventually blooms as an actress. But at the play's peak, which contains the last word on M and D's relationship, Cronin's performance fails to build to an appropriately devastating crescendo, and the show ends on an unresolved note as Cronin picks up her suitcase and hurries off the stage.